pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

Adventures of Glitter Girl Category

I recently purchased a Minc machine for metallic foiling and have used it easily enough for cards and gift tags, but I’m at a loss as to how to use it on my scrapbook pages. I have plenty of foil, so it seems only right to make this investment work for all my paper crafting, including my layouts! Glitter Girl, can you help?

Of course I can! This week, Glitter Girl takes on the challenge to use the Minc on her pages by customising 3×4 Project Life cards with metallic foiled fish to match some toddler artwork that needs a spot in the scrapbook.

I have the full size twelve inch Minc but the foiler is also available in a smaller six inch machine if that better suits your budget, your space, or your needs! This project would work perfectly fine with the smaller size, since the journaling cards are 3×4 inches. Do be sure you buy the Minc for your part of the world: as it plugs in and heats up, you’ll need the version with the right plug. They are available!

Other supplies for this page include the Color Chaos collection and Sand & Surf papers from Bella Blvd, enamel dots from Doodlebug Designs, letter stickers by October Afternoon, word stickers by My Mind’s Eye, flair badges by American Crafts, and a variety of washi tapes.

In terms of kids and artwork, I can already see why this becomes such a challenge over the years! He’s only just turned two and of course I already have a significant stack of paint strokes, colouring sheets, and other creative projects! (Stickers are big here. Of course stickers are big here.) We have a big art-student-style book with plain pages to paste things in and leave a little label with any relevant notes, but I’d like to include just a sprinkling of the actual pieces in our chronological family albums, and it struck me that it will work perfectly to include things that are a) the right size for a 12×12 page and b) have a corresponding photo that helps tell the story. Aside from letting him doodle on a card in my Christmas journal, I’m pretty sure this is the first page where his artwork appears right in the album. It was a delight to show the page to him when it was in the album and he clapped! That’s probably the biggest accolade I’ve ever had for scrapping, so I’m flying high now!

I’ve long had the Paislee Press Mini Masterpieces project in my bookmarks, thinking that big student portfolio may become unwieldy over the years to come and thinking a Photo Book would be a lovely way to keep the evidence without the complication. I’d love to see other ways you’ve kept child art, be it in your scrapbooks or another system of saving things. If it’s something you’ve shared online, by all means leave us a link in the comments. Or feel free to just share a thought of what has worked for you. I’m sure many of us go through this stage of wanting to find some sort of guidelines for which pieces we keep and which ones go from the fridge to the recycling bin!

And of course, links to your projects with the Minc are also welcome! If you have the Minc, do you find you use it more for small format projects like cards and gifts or is foil becoming a definite design theme in your scrapbooks?

Disclosure: Product links in this post are affiliate links. All are supplies I use and enjoy! Affiliate commissions on shimelle.com blog posts pay the guest artists who share their work here. Thank you for your support.

This week, Glitter Girl is on a quest to help with those situations where you have lots of photos and quite like the idea of using more than one size of photo, but that’s where the stumbling block hits. I’ve She’s chosen Wonder Boy’s first birthday party as the plentifully-photographed event, and a year on, there is just one page in my scrapbook from that day. There are about fifty photos in a folder on my computer so perhaps it’s time to make some progress with that!

I won’t scrapbook all fifty, but I do think I’ll make about four 12×12 pages on this, and I know two of them will be single photo layouts – the one I already made and one I have in my mind with a photo that doesn’t really match the look of the other pictures I have from that day. That leaves me with two pages left and forty-eight photos to choose from!

Going through that folder and thinking about the day helped immensely: I knew I wanted a big picture of the cake, then I have a bunch of other snapshots from various moments of the day that aren’t really stunners in the same way as those two that will get their own layouts, but they capture the way I remember that day now and that’s exactly why I want to get them in my book. I knew it would be way too many to include all those on just one page, so combining two with the cake worked for me.

There’s lots of True Stories supplies on this page, though in the complete layout there is actually at least something from all four of my collections with American Crafts, since the red letters are from Christmas Magic! But definitely plenty of True Stories rockets, as that was the big design feature of the party. Is using a particular paper line for the party decor and then using it again to scrapbook those photos venturing into the territory of buying patterned paper or die-cuts first then going out to buy clothes to match? It just might be. I think I’m okay with that.

Way back at the very beginning of Glitter Girl’s adventures – adventure four, in fact – she went on a layering mission, and then the layers rarely stopped on her pages! This week’s adventure takes her right back to that idea: if layers are something you love on other scrapbook pages but you’re not loving how they come out on your own desk, what simple steps could you remember to help it all work?

In this case, it’s layers in the embellishments of the page, and those steps include allocating space with horizontal grounding lines, adding texture with ink or mist, and working through different textures, like paper, stickers, and enamel dots. Add in a limited colour palette and slight angles, and the layers work with a variety of supplies for a new look from the same technique on each page.

If you’re this far and you’ve watched this video, you might be wondering what this new class talk is all about. It’s been a while since I developed a new extended class, but I’m happy to say that is exactly what’s on the way. This class will start Monday the 2nd of May, and includes videos, PDFs, and regular emails over the course of the month, concluding on the 31st of May. I’ll be sharing the full class details here next Monday, but I try to offer an early bird discount on most of my classes and I’m happy to share that with you today. This course is a natural follow-on from Cover to Cover, but it is not a requirement to take that course in order to participate or enjoy the things we’ll cover. Looking at three specific albums, we’ll bridge the gap between the smaller things like supply choices, embellishment placement, and page design up to the big things like selecting the photos when you take thousands, how to make the album feel like it goes together without getting too repetitive, and writing your story as you create each page. The full price will be $30 USD or £20 GBP, but from now until next Monday, you can sign up for $24 USD (that’s about £17 GBP, and the currency will convert automatically, so no need to worry). At this point, you’ll receive a payment receipt email, then you’ll get another email on Monday to welcome you to the class forum, though the class does not begin until the 2nd of May. And at any time, you can contact Nikki or me, if you have a question or need further help. Thanks so much for your interest in the new class, and I look forward to showing you the full outline on Monday!

Glitter Girl has been avoiding one particular question for a while. It came from so many different people. Students with zero scrapping budget. Overseas scrappers crying from the cost of shipping and import tax. Scrappers with no space for stash or no cash for stash. And a scrapbooker who just turned her craft room into a nursery for twins balancing the emotion of probably not having time to scrapbook much for a while while also having an innate need to create in order to feel just right.

That challenge was to scrapbook without much in the way of supplies. No stickers. No purchased embellishments. No big stack of patterned paper and drawer of punches.

One sheet of white cardstock and whatever is left in a 6×6 paper pad that has done a fair bit already. Nothing else.

This is the most intimidating challenge Glitter Girl has ever taken on, I do believe!

And she cheated. That washi tape and the hole punch are totally cheating. Disappointing, really.

That toddler painting technique is something that needs to appear more in my albums, but it was only after I finished the page that I realised it needs to involve an actual toddler. I’m going to pull out some cardstock the next time he is painting and see if anything might make a nice background. I might as well put him to work, right?

But truthfully: this challenge has made me look like a deer in the headlights every time it has been asked in any wording, and yet I am so, so glad I tried it. You can too: grab a 6×6 paper pad and one sheet of cardstock for your background and go. If you end up needing to cheat a smidge, so be it, but the victory of getting to the end and realising the whole page was basically made with leftovers from a 6×6 paper pad? That feeling is pretty fabulous indeed!

This week, Glitter Girl’s quest comes from a mother and grandmother of all girls who is expecting her very first grandson any time now. What’s a scrapper to do with years of feminine stash accumulated and a new challenge of how to make it work with boy photos? Embrace a bit of pink and floral with all things baby boy, I think. Unless you purely want an excuse to go shopping for new stash, and that’s perfectly acceptable too!

I haven’t really changed my buying habits on adding a boy to the family and this adventure made me stop and think about why that is the case. I think it’s largely down to not tending to buy themed papers, so I have stacks of dots and stripes and chevrons but very little in the realm of princesses or tractors. Of course there are some themed papers that capture my eye and I will still pick up, but as a rule of thumb, I go with patterns I know will be versatile no matter what photos I feel like scrapbooking on any given day.

Of course, if you’re going to challenge me to use some florals, I’m not going to waste an opportunity to pull out those Sassafras floral papers that remind me of the soft sheets on the guest bed whenever we visited someone as a child. I think large florals with a more organic shape like this (be they truer to an actual flower or quite abstract like a watercolour) are easier to work with on a boy page than something very graphic, orderly, or closer to a cartoon style, but you may find otherwise.

I also wanted to try a different composition on this page as I’ve been in a bit of a repeat mode lately with my boxes of paper. I love my boxes, but it is so refreshing to change it up now and then, so I wanted to work from the edges of the paper into the middle rather than the other way around. I really enjoyed this composition and the next page I picked up, I went straight to an edge without thinking about it, so soon you may need to remind me to work some other way again.

Jessica at Scraptastic spotted my love of pandas on Instagram and sent me their February kit that includes the adorable panda flair. I really liked how the cards had square corners and the cardstock is nice and thick! (It was a lovely gift and there was no obligation for me to use it, share it, or review it, but I was very impressed with the quality and the designs. I’m going to try it in Wonder Boy’s baby book next, I think.)

My last thought on this whole idea of ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ papers and supplies: it is totally up to you. Personally I have no problem using pink or florals or whatever on a page for the boys of my life, but that’s me. I also feel okay with it being a way to show that my pages are something I made and florals and pink are very me, so that’s okay. But if the boys of your life would be offended or it doesn’t feel right to you, then do what does work! Obviously! I enjoyed the challenge though, and you could always try it once and make your decision going forward for what does and doesn’t work for your albums. Happy scrapping either way!

If you haven’t caught up with Glitter Girl recently, her latest adventure is a big one – oversized photos! She’s been helping me with this ongoing addition to that first year baby book: one 12×12 page each month with a photo printed at A4 size. I love how this changes the pace of all the tiny pockets in that book and lets me include those favourite portraits to chart his growth over the first year.

The photos were all taken with the same set up and the first six months went really well! I have the first six framed on the wall because they look so lovely together (in my opinion, anyway!) because he would happily lay on the duvet and look at the camera without much moving. There’s no fancy photo backdrop or anything – the walls in the room are white and there’s a white duvet on the bed and a big window to open the curtains for good light! I actually tried a bunch of different cute settings the day he turned one month, including props and my beloved rocking chair and all sorts of things that would give scale to him growing, but they were so much work to set up that I realised I would never have the stamina to reset the props and get it just right every month for an entire year! Making the bed was a lot easier. All the white makes it less about stuff and more about him anyway, which is why I love the pictures. But from month seven, things got very complicated as he wouldn’t sit still for a second! The second half of the year is hit and miss in terms of photographic brilliance, but the whole set makes me happy and this one is a definite favourite.

I love how big, gorgeous photos almost make the page themselves, but the space remaining still gives you plenty of potential. I’ve put together a special Pinterest board just for scrapbook pages with big photos, so do give it a look if you’d like to find something that works with your picture and style.

Then I asked special guest Karen Moss to join us with a big photo of her own! Please give Karen a warm welcome.

My daughter had her hair dyed auburn as a post exam treat and I loved how different it made her look. The only photos I had were the ones I ‘swiped’ from her Facebook page and particularly loved this one. The majority of my pages have a single photo and although this photo was not very good quality it was worthy of being printed at 8×10 to showcase her new ‘red hot’ look.

I am a big fan of detail cutting and foam pads, and the grey floral paper from True Stories I chose was ideal for this. I used two sheets as I wanted to use the polka dot b-side for part of my base and cut out the flowers from the a-side for my embellishments.
-Karen

Now it’s your turn! Choose a photo you love and scrap it in a big way. Anything else is totally up to you.

This week’s question comes from Val, who asked:I miss using all my older scrapbooking tools and supplies like mist, paint, and plain chipboard. I know styles change, but I have so much older stuff. It would make me feel better to mix my new and old supplies more frequently. Glitter Girl, can you help?

So this week, Glitter Girl shares her top tips for getting rid of the guilt of scrapbooking supplies you’ve had a long time and getting more of them onto your pages, and of course there’s a new scrapbook page to show those tips in action. Come along for the adventure, won’t you?

Let go of anything giving you guilt
I know what is like to hold onto supplies because you paid good money for them. I’ve been writing about this topic for a while now and I often find myself looking at supplies and asking myself ‘is this the new version of my special expensive paper?’ and sometimes it totally is. I liked it when I bought it but I kept it because I spent money on it… not because I am loving how it would look on my page. So with the exception of that original super ugly paper that made me have the realisation, if I don’t love it, it goes to someone else. It might be brand new or I may have had it for fifteen years.

Plain chipboard is something I don’t really love, and I only had a few little exceptions I had kept because I thought they would be easy to adapt. I’m taking that as a good sign that I didn’t have to choose between twenty-three unopened packages of plain chipboard shapes.

Find a way to let go that makes you feel good instead of rubbish
Years ago, I posted on Freecycle to give away a big box of offcuts and leftover workshop supplies and stuff that was just weighing me down but was still so lovely I didn’t want to just put it in the recycling. Someone answered and it turned out she ran crafting workshops with the patients in a children’s hospital. Perfect. I give her big boxes a few times a year and I feel good about it rather than rubbish! I love that I can help with a cause that hits my heart. You don’t need to find your good connection in some random way like that and you can go direct to a source you know. Call up a children’s hospital, school, scouting group, Sunday school, family shelter – whatever feels right to you. Don’t let not knowing anyone there scare you. You can send an email or make a phone call and find the solution for you, if you are in the position of being overrun with supplies. (If your stash is small and you don’t have the overrun problem, that’s okay too! But it does happen, and it’s good to make a change for the better than to live with guilt every time you look at your supplies.)

Choose up to three older products or tools to use at any time
If I set myself a mission to ‘use older stuff’, I would be so overwhelmed. There are too many options, especially after so many years of scrapping and collecting supplies! I work best with a visual reminder I can see and I don’t like to move around much once I start my page (even though I scrap standing up – go figure). A mission that does work for me is something more narrow and specific, so I can challenge myself to ‘use acrylic paint, plain chipboard, and embossing powder’ and I put those things on my desk before I start the page. That way I couldn’t easily forget – they were staring at me! (I’ll admit, this visual aid works best if my desk is relatively tidy when I start so nothing gets lost.) I ended up making a few more silver hearts than were practical for my finished design, so those are currently still on my desk, waiting to go on my next project. They’d be great for a Valentine card, so I’ll use them straight away but I packed them away somewhere, I guarantee I would forget and in three years we’d be having this discussion about challenging myself to use two random silver hearts. Trust me.

Create pages that are still in a style you love
With just those few things picked out as my old supply mission, I don’t feel obligated to time warp my style to how I was scrapbooking when I purchased every colour of acrylic paint or stockpiled plain chipboard (remember the cute lunch tins they came in? They made it hard to resist!) and I can mix those elements with current papers, stickers, and whatever else, as well as photos currently inspiring me. My style stays true to how I make stuff today, which gives me a little game of figuring out how to mix those older things with the new ones! (Short answer: usually less is more and I find I’ll add a little acrylic paint now where ten years ago I would have added a heap of the stuff. On this page, I love the texture it gives to those paint layers without the layout shouting HEY! I USED MY PAINT! IN 2016! This makes me happy. I’m not a fan of shouty pages.)

In terms of supplies, the old stuff is old, okay! Jenni Bowlin chipboard hearts (I also kept quite a few of her chipboard butterflies), Ranger acrylic paint from the days when Jenni was a signature designer there, and American Crafts Zing embossing powder in silver. The papers come from my Starshine line (the grey star), Dear Lizzy Documentary (ampersands and turquoise boxes) and Happy Place (red cross hatch). Plus silver Fitzgerald Thickers for the title, a journaling card from the Polka Dot Party Project Life mini kit, washi tape from an old Studio Calico kit, stickers from True Stories, and some red Pebbles pearl dots. I think that’s everything!

If you want a bit more Glitter Girl in your life, you’re welcome to chat and share what you’re making in the Facebook group Scrapbook like a Superhero. See you next Wednesday for a new adventure!

This week Glitter Girl sets off on a quest with two purposes: to turn her paper scraps into unique embellishments and then to make them work on a page with her favourite products. The question was posed by Tori Bissell, a scrapbooker with her own YouTube channel, who loves making her own embellishments from small scraps of paper she stores in a cookie tin. I love this both because a cookie tin means she is far more controlled with the amount of paper scraps she has left (mine take up an entire basket) and it makes me hungry (mmm cookies).

Cookies aside, Glitter Girl delved into the scraps and used stamps, scissors, and punches to create the embellishments on this selfie page, but there are store-bought supplies in the mix too: enamel hearts, stickers, and a transparency sheet in addition to all the patterned paper. Come along for the adventure, won’t you?

It’s a lot of embellishment. It was very much a more-is-more feel to the workflow, but if that much embellishment puts you a little on edge, there are a few things to consider. First, I think you can add as much or as little as you like as long as you enjoy making it! Second, I really like a mix of very embellished pages in my album alongside pages that are very simple and 12×12 photo prints. I love that mix together and I feel it makes me look at everything with a closer eye when I flip from page to page in the book. (The book in scrapbook is so important to me that it’s very difficult for me to break it down to one page at a time, actually!) And third, if all else fails remember you are in control of your pages and you can learn by your reaction that you don’t want that much embellishment on your page! It’s definitely easier and cheaper to learn that lesson by watching rather than doing. Anyway, I love a little more is more when I’m in a paper groove.

While we’re on the subject of handmade embellishments from scraps, don’t forget to check out Tori’s YouTube Channel and her Scrap your Scraps series for more ideas on working with those little pieces of paper you love way too much to put in the recycling bin.